Data analysts command premium over software engineers and get up to 40% more premium in compensation benefits.

BANGALORE: Anirban Dey, vice-president of in-memory platform technologies at SAP Labs, works with a 100-member team. Most of them are engineers involved in software development or quality management, but roughly a fifth are researchers who look a few years into the future.

Researchers are part of many large R&D centres, but some of Dey’s team members are specialists in Natural Language Processing (NLP), who would have found it difficult to fit into IT companies other than a Google or a Yahoo.

“NLP experts are now becoming more mainstream given the current focus on social analytics in customer engagement,” says Dey. As companies increasingly start analysing data, and the nature and size of data make insights more and more difficult, a new set of specialists is suddenly in great demand.

SAP Labs doesn’t have a name for them, but they are known in some companies – like IBM, EMC and HP – as data scientists, a phrase coined more than a year ago for someone with special skills to analyse data. Data scientists command a premium over software engineers, but companies don’t typically hire them in large numbers.

“Data scientists would get at least a 30% to 40% premium in compensation benefits when compared with software engineers,” says Arnab Chakraborty, Director, HP Global Analytics. The company, which has a strong presence in India, hires engineers with some experience and domain expertise.

Many of its employees have advanced degrees, with expertise in subjects like statistics, computer science, economics and applied mathematics. But data scientists also include business domain experts with strong data analytical skills, and managers who know how to work with large, fastflowing data.

Data analytics is not a new phenomenon, but its power and penetration among companies have increased tremendously in the past few years, causing the surge in demand for data scientists. A report by the McKinsey Global Institute last year predicted a surge in big data usage and a major shortage of those who can handle the relevant technologies.

By 2018, the US alone would have a shortage of 1,40,000 to 1,90,000 people with deep analytical skills and 1.5 million managers and analysts who know how to take good decisions using data. Many business schools and universities around the country are beginning to design courses to meet the shortage of data scientists.

In the US, a few colleges have had master’s programmes in data analytics for a while, prominent among them being the University of North Carolina, where the Institute of Advanced Analytics has been offering a Master of Science in Analytics since 2007.

This year, Northwestern University will become among the first top universities in the US to start a master’s degree programme in business analytics. These courses will select topics from statistics, machine learning, optimisation, distributed computing and related fields to prepare specialists who can develop or manage technologies around big data.

Indian universities and B-schools are also starting to offer courses in data science, although many don’t call it by this name. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore is among the first to start a master’s degree programme on business analytics, and its first set of students will graduate next year.

This management course prepares students intensively for a career in data science, as they learn business topics as well as subjects like data mining, operations research and behaviour science. “Our masters of management students in business analytics will have a combination of business and analytical skills that might be lacking in a pure business or computer science or statistics degree,” says Bala Subrahmanya, professor and chairman at the department of management studies.

Other universities are following suit. Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad has an Asia Analytics Lab that prepares its students to analyse data. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are starting similar courses. IIT-Bombay, for example, has started a part-time programme in business analytics.

Private education companies are in the game as well. Rajeev Baphna, till recently head of Global Analytics Centre at Citigroup, has launched a startup that will provide training in analytics, among others. “Even a three-month course will prepare students with a quantitative background for a career in data and predictive modelling,” says Kalpana Subbaramappa, an analytics education consultant in Bangalore.

The big companies have vigorous programmes in universities across India. IBM, which hires more data scientists than anybody else, has skill development programmes with 500 Indian universities. IBM conducts training programmes on predictive and business analytics for faculty in universities, and these faculty members will be qualified to teach students how analytics can be applied to their field.

EMC offers courses in social networking analytics. Data skills are in demand even at a basic level, and could one day be a fundamental skill for any engineer or manager.